Wow. I had no idea. But by taking the max, they ignore all synergistic effects. That seems bad. Of course, they also ignore "natural pollutants", i.e., pollens and spores, which also have synergistic effects with pollutants like ozone. It's an impressive piece of work, but I'd say there is still a lot of scope for improvement.
My understanding is that the AQI is tied very closely with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS https://www.epa.gov/criteria-air-pollutants/naaqs-table) as part of the EPA's mandate from the Clear Air Act... so yeah, things like pollen aren't in scope. It also doesn't cover transient hazards like toxic spills/chemical spills and fires. There's plenty of room for improvement, tho the situation is intimately tied to law and policy issues.
Yeah, there always seems to be an intended use overprint. I'm currently working on a project looking at disaster preparedness and found a lot of great data from FEMA, but it all has a heavy economic overprint which I don't need. Fortunately they made the raw data available.
Cool read! Like you mentioned, I always wondered how AQI can be represented by just a single number. But it was interesting to know how the simplicity perfectly suited the use case here as to how it suffices to just know the degree of how good or bad the air quality is and that we don’t need to go all crazy on coming up with a fancy methodology for super accurate point estimates.
Wow. I had no idea. But by taking the max, they ignore all synergistic effects. That seems bad. Of course, they also ignore "natural pollutants", i.e., pollens and spores, which also have synergistic effects with pollutants like ozone. It's an impressive piece of work, but I'd say there is still a lot of scope for improvement.
My understanding is that the AQI is tied very closely with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS https://www.epa.gov/criteria-air-pollutants/naaqs-table) as part of the EPA's mandate from the Clear Air Act... so yeah, things like pollen aren't in scope. It also doesn't cover transient hazards like toxic spills/chemical spills and fires. There's plenty of room for improvement, tho the situation is intimately tied to law and policy issues.
Yeah, there always seems to be an intended use overprint. I'm currently working on a project looking at disaster preparedness and found a lot of great data from FEMA, but it all has a heavy economic overprint which I don't need. Fortunately they made the raw data available.
Cool read! Like you mentioned, I always wondered how AQI can be represented by just a single number. But it was interesting to know how the simplicity perfectly suited the use case here as to how it suffices to just know the degree of how good or bad the air quality is and that we don’t need to go all crazy on coming up with a fancy methodology for super accurate point estimates.